Well, not really.
In the continuing saga of my father’s medical problems, we’ve gotten hit with some new stuff this week.
For the past month he’s been recovering, his vision slowly improving, and his blood pressure still going all over the place. A follow-up CT scan on his skull showed more fluid building up outside his brain, again, so he’s scheduled for surgery next week for another burr hole to drain that. If that were all, though, I wouldn’t be posting. It’s expected he’ll go in, be operated on, and then be out the next day.
Last week he went to see his GP for a routine check-up and when he was weighed, there, where the had records of his weight other than those he keeps in his head, he finally allowed as how my mother and I were correct to say he’d recently lost about 15 lbs (over the holidays, no less!). When the GP was presented with that information, he agreed with us (my father included) that that large an unexplained weight loss should be investigated. So they took blood and ran a battery of tests.
We got back the results today, and it’s not what we were hoping to hear.
There are indications his kidneys are not working as well as they should be. A serious concern, but the other news put that right out of my mind. He’s got elevated PSA numbers, but that’s not exactly new - he’s been being treated for a high PSA for over a decade, now.
The bloodwork also came back with highly elevated numbers for pancreatic indicators. (My father said enzymes, but IIRC that doesn’t make sense for blood work - since an enzyme is specifically for digestion, isn’t it?) Whether my memory is correct, or not, pancreatic indicators are the last damned thing I wanted to hear about.
Of course, it’s also the last damned thing anyone else wanted to hear. As can be measured by the speed of the response. He’s going in, tomorrow morning, for an abdominal CT scan to get a look at the condition of his pancreas.
Dammit. I know it’s far too early to be saying pancreatic cancer. It has to be ruled out, of course, as probably the worst possible explanation for the symptoms we’ve measured, but it’s far from being confirmed. Even if it is that, early detection is always a huge boon in these cases, and such a relatively minor weight loss (my father is over 100 lbs overweight - so 15 lbs is about 7-8% bodymass, tops) leaves room to hope that it’s early enough a detection that measures can be taken.
I also know that pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly ones. Again, as an artifact of the general late detection.
Blast it all.